If that’s something that regularly happens in the US, do you have any examples from the last decade, instead of three examples from 55-60 years ago?

Schulze is great, but good luck explaining how it works to my mother.

Schulze is good for elections at STEM organizations. For the general public, something like approval voting or STAR are better.

How many net new housing units did they build from 2011 to 2021?

Or, better yet, we could just build more units.

They tried banning landlords in specific neighborhoods in Rotterdam.

It lead to gentrification.

The people who bought the units, on average, were more wealthy than existing renters, but less wealthy than existing owner-occupiers. Basically, it forced poor people out of that neighborhood, and replaced them with middle class people.

There’s a lot of reasons why buying a house is expensive. In many places, it’s less because of corporate landlords, and more due to population growth outpacing housing growth.

If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

The fathers of 44% of Israel were born in Israel, as of 2015. I doubt they have dual citizenship, just as most Americans don’t have dual citizenship to their grandparents and great grandparents countries of origin.

Also, most Mizrahim and Sephardim these days are living in Israel, similarly to how most Ashkenazim are in the US. Even if an Israeli somehow has e.g. Iraqi, Iranian or Yemeni citizenship, moving back probably isn’t a safe idea. Morocco is probably safer, though.

After the fall of the USSR, there was also a huge wave of Russian emigration to Israel. Given conscription for the war in Ukraine, moving back now might not be the best idea.

To be fair, the dramatic nosedive in quality of GoT happened when they ran out of source material and had to wing it.

3-body problem is a finished trilogy, so it could all have the quality of the first seasons of GoT.

A dozen cosmere novels is what, four years of writing for him?

Western Europe used to be much more of a dialect continuum. Every village had their own dialect, and you could understand everyone around you.

But if you went from Castile to Paris, you’d go from hearing Spanish to hearing French. It’s just that between them, you had dozens of intermediate languages/dialects that transitioned very smoothly. It’s not like today where if you cross a border people go from speaking French to speaking Spanish.

A large part of the nation-building project in Western Europe was to force everyone in the country to learn and use some standard dialect. So very few people now speak Occitan, Picard, Burgundian, etc., and instead speak standard French.

This is also why the stereotypical NJ Italian-American pronunciation of things sounds so unlike Italian.

It’s not that Americans somehow turned “pasta e fagioli” into “pasta fazool”. They turned “pasta e fasule” into “pasta fazool”, which is a much smaller leap.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/approval/joe-biden/?ex_cid=abcpromo

Looks like he’s at ~38% approval, ~58% disapproval.

For what it’s worth, the ipsos poll here is a bit of an outlier compared to other recent polls.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/

Yeah, there’s a pretty big difference between a lawn in Vermont or Ohio, and one in Nevada or southern California.

Grass really, really depends on location and climate. I literally never water or fertilize my lawn; it looks fine.

The worse thing here is ecological. I keep my mower set to 4", and keep my lawn a bit longer than my neighbors. I see a ton of fire flies in my yard in the summer, and see a fraction as many in my neighbors yard.

Short lawns are terrible habitat, which makes them good for sports or a children’s play area. But 80% of my neighbor’s lawn is just aesthetic, which is something I really don’t get. Lawns are about as visually exciting as a beige wall. They’re a waste of space.

Fair. I should have said that many legless lizards aren’t snakes.

Not in the right clade, basically.

They look similar, but aren’t directly related. It’s similar to why legless lizards aren’t snakes, and bats aren’t birds.

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

No?

Proportional representation is where parties get a number of seats proportional to the percent of votes they get.

Proportional voting methods are often nation-wide, although there’s also e.g. mixed member proportional and local 3-5 member districts elected via STV like they do in Ireland.

The last three third party candidates who won more than one state were Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and Theodore Roosevelt.

The first two won the south on account of regional anger at the civil rights movement.

Roosevelt split the vote. 50.6% of the country voted for the Republican candidate or a former Republican, but the Democrat won a landslide with only 41% of the popular vote and 81% of the electoral college vote.

The closest a third party candidate has ever come to winning is Breckenridge, who got 18% of the popular vote and 23.8% of the EC vote running as a Southern Democrat because the south didn’t like Stephen Douglas (who got 29.5% of the popular vote but only won a single state).

Voting third party basically doesn’t work. Any time its been significant, it’s just caused a spoiler effect.